I expect you’re familiar with the Nike, or Winged Victory of Samothrace—it stands in the Louvre in Paris, where it has stood since its rediscovery in the eighteen-sixties. There’s also a good copy of it actually in Samothrace. The swept-back wings, the blown draperies—she was sculpted landing on a ship, and you can almost feel the wind. It’s the contrast between the stillness of the stone and the motion of what is sculpted that makes her such a treasure. But she’s headless in the Louvre, because Pico and Athene stole the head, the head which had for a time rested in our Temple of Nike. Her hair is swept back by the wind too, but her eyes and her smile are completely still. Her eyes seem to focus on you wherever you are. The head reminds me a little of the head of the Charioteer at Delphi, although it’s completely different, of course, and marble not bronze. But there’s something about the expression that’s the same. I suppose Athene and I are the only ones who have seen her with the head, at Samothrace, and without, in the Louvre, and then seen just the head, in the City. Nobody else in the City had ever seen any part of her but the head. I tried to comfort myself that in some future incarnation Simmea, who loved the head and had died defending it, would be sure to see the rest of her. It only made me cry harder.

“We’ll get it back,” I said, choking out the words.

“Yes.” Klymene hesitated. “I know I’m the worst person to be with you now, and I would leave you in peace, but I don’t think you ought to be alone.”

I sat up and looked at her. She was the same physical age as all of us Children, almost forty now. She had been pretty once, lithe and graceful, with shining hair. She was still trim from working with the auxiliaries, but her face had sagged, and her hair been cut off at the jaw to fit under a helmet. She looked weary. I had known her for a long time. We’d both been brought to the Republic when we were ten. When we were fourteen she’d been a coward and I’d said it was all right because she was a girl, and she’d never forgiven me. When we were sixteen we’d shared the single worst sexual experience of my life, then had a son together. When we were nineteen and Athene had turned Sokrates into a fly and everything had subsequently fallen apart, we’d both stayed and tried to make the revised original Republic work, instead of going off to start fresh somewhere else.

“You’re not any worse to be with right now than anyone else who isn’t Simmea,” I said.

“How are you going to manage without her?” she asked.